John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Time for the next entry covering Shawn Riley’s list of 101 Tips to Make your EMR and EHR More Useful. I met someone at a conference who commented that they liked this series of posts. I hope you’re all enjoying the series as well.

15 Avoid multiple sign-ins if possible.
One thing seems abundantly clear to me: healthcare IT will be a heterogeneous environment. This is particularly true in the hospital world. Even the biggest behemoth of an HIS can’t satisfy all of the healthcare IT requirements of a hospital. So, getting a great SSO (single sign on) solution will be really important and turns out to be a great thing for your users and your help desk.

14 Make sure security is solid, but not prohibitive.
One thing about healthcare security and HIPAA that’s often misunderstood is that it should protect patient’s information, but it should also not get in the way of a clinician doing what they legitimately need to accomplish. Many security policies go too far and make legitimate healthcare work too hard. This is a huge mistake.

13 PDSA – Use it! Plan – Do – Study – Act
In this one, Shawn talks about the idea of continuous improvement which is a really good one. I also think far too many companies get stuck in the planning and do far too little doing and acting. All four steps of the process are important and useful, but don’t over think it either.

12 LEAN
Lean isn’t about being cheap. Lean isn’t about providing substandard care. Lean is about spending where it matters most. It’s about focusing on what’s most important and creating value from the things you spend money on. I’d love to see more LEAN concepts used in healthcare.

11 Buy MORE printers
Yep! Printing increases dramatically with an EHR. Almost all those forms that you use to print in bulk will now be coming out of your printer. Also, just because somewhere is fully electronic doesn’t mean that they are paperless. Paperless is a mythical creature that will likely never be achieved in our lifetime. Make the printers accessible for your providers.

If you want to see my analysis of the other 101 EMR and EHR tips, I’ll be updating this page with my 101 EMR and EHR tips analysis. So, click on that link to see the other EMR tips.